Cooling

When the wort has boiled the necessary time, it is turned into the hop back to settle. A hop back is a wooden or metal vessel, fitted with a false bottom of perforated plates; the latter retain the spent hops, the wort being drawn off into the coolers. After resting for a brief period in the hop back, the bright wort is run into the coolers. The cooler is a very shallow vessel of great area, and the result of the exposure of the hot wort to a comparatively large volume of air is that a part of the hop constituents and other substances contained in the wort are rendered insoluble and are precipitated. It was formerly considered absolutely essential that this hot aeration should take place, but in many breweries nowadays coolers are not used, the wort being run direct from the hop back to the refrigerator. There is much to be said for this procedure, as the exposure of hot wort in the cooler is attended with much danger of bacterial and wild yeast infection, but it is still a moot point whether the cooler or its equivalent can be entirely dispensed with for all classes of beers. A rational alteration would appear to be to place the cooler in an air-tight chamber supplied with purified and sterilized air. This principle has already been applied to the refrigerator, and apparently with success. In America the cooler is frequently replaced by a cooling tank, an enclosed vessel of some depth, capable of artificial aeration. It is not practicable, in any case, to cool the wort sufficiently on the cooler to bring it to the proper temperature for the fermentation stage, and for this purpose, therefore, the refrigerator is employed. There are several kinds of refrigerators, the main distinction being that some are vertical, others horizontal; but the principle in each case is much the same, and consists in allowing a thin film or stream of wort to trickle over a series of pipes through which cold water circulates. Fig. 5, Plate I., shows refrigerators, employed in Messrs Allsopp's lager beer brewery, at work.